Is all about money. It just happens that it requires less money for Sony to buy exclusivity than for Xbox to pay to bring it to the console. That’s it.
It would just cost Xbox more money than Sony. But that’s what they need to sign up for to get best in class 3rd party support until they get a bigger user base.
Y’all seem to care more about third party than the actual exclusive games coming to MS platforms.
Well given that Activision will be first-party and we don’t know anything they’re working on outside of Call of Duty and the few Blizzard titles, that’s all that there is to talk about. I’m sure if they come out and say they’ve got a dozen franchises in the works that will be exclusive, but Call of Duty and Overwatch won’t be people would be (mostly) okay with it, but for now all we’ve got is “We spent $70 billion to keep putting games on Playstation” which goes against pretty much everything that Xbox has been doing for the last 5+ years.
The reality is they spent 70 billion to get those games day one on gamepass, improve the working conditions for employees, and help them make better games.
My main problem is that it will take years before Xbox will get the exclusive games. It was expected, but still annoying. But in general people concerned about the big games and big names. No matter how good the first party games are gonna be - big names like Quake or Doom or Starfield or TES will overshadow anything as they are well known across various communities.
Exclusive GTA6 will generate more engagement that the whole Sony first party combined for example.
Interestingly I just did a thread on this here: Which new AAA studio should Xbox do a partnership with?
There’s so many new ‘AAA’ studios that Xbox could be backing right now, however only Sony seem to be doing it.
So Sony have CoD marketing until 2024, so it’s possible we might not even get a new CoD on gamepass until 2025 depending on what’s in those existing contracts
Oof 
Yes. Until 2024-2025 we won’t have the fruits of the big games. Ironically TES6 will probably come out around that time too
It is still amazing how Sony has FIFA, COD and GTA deals simultaneously.
I do wonder what will happen with EA’s football franchise now they have dropped the FIFA license.
It’s always in the top 20 and even did better than Minecraft in 2021.
They did?
Have they stated this? I wouldn’t be surprised if they did it with GTA.
Personally I think they should be supporting the new AAA studios (as per my other thread), it helps create new relationships which could lead to acquisition and potentially some of the biggest new IP’s.
No, I think they won’t make any time exclusive deal regarding GTA at all. They should get the marketing deal though.
It is still not set in stone though
Lets look at some of the positives here…no really seeing the Nintendo Direct today put me in a good mode
Primarily focused on COD, and popular Activision/Blizzard games, you know Overwatch is up there, so is Diablo 4 HOWEVER…This is 100% going to be a “sign into your Microsoft account” scenario here. Even Minecraft on Playstation and Switch require a Microsoft login now so 100% expect it for Activision games. I don’t think Xbox would of bought Activision without some plan for most of the games to be exclusive.
If it’s focused on the most popular, chances are the rest of Activision games are obscure enough ei THPS, Crash, Spyro, Guitar Hero, and can stay exclusive. Also games like the new Blizzard IP and new games in existing franchises ei a Starcraft Ghost
This now makes it much less likely for Sony to try to acquire a publisher and maybe they’ll tell Sony to ease off timed exclusivity too …Sony got a reality check here and found out how easily MS can stomp them out of existence by buying whatever they want and starving Playstation of 3rd party games…and while Playstation first party make great games they lack the brand power that Nintendo games do to single handedly carry Playstation like Nintendo first party carries the Switch
COD being on Playstation means Sony made FPS have almost no chance of ever being successful. MS destroys Sony’s games via proxy by COD being on Playstation
Finally and this may be something people are not looking at…at the end of the day this means more revenue for MS to dump into first party…now that the FTC is going to f*ck right off MS can go back to acquiring…lets face it…with $70 billion MS could of funded first party for like 10-15 years easily. Now they don’t have to wait for the Activision deal to finalize and they can go back to hunting for more studios.
So Sony goes out of their way to secure big 3rd party marketing rights, have reportedly gone out of their way to moneyhat games they know are popular on Xbox and iirc they even went after Starfield after securing two Bethesda games, even if those two games won’t break records it’s still Bethesda, a publisher they know well is very popular among Xbox fans so it was yet another aggressive move, showing everyone that their aggressiveness during the PS4 era was going to continue onto the PS5 generation, I didn’t mention essentially taking away Final Fantasy from Xbox, a franchise that already had cultivated an audience on Xbox (I remember FFXV actually selling quite well on Xbox)… And let me throw the KOTOR remake out there too… anyway.
Xbox essentially misses out on a bunch of games due to the market share they have in the console space, thus making it even easier for Sony to moneyhat 3rd parties, what happened last gen, with Activision Microsoft has a chance to maybe make things more even in the console space to avoid things like this, if the split was more even it would be harder for Sony to secure those 3rd party deals but still Microsoft doesn’t have any interest in making something like COD exclusive because…? can the FTC really do anything about it? but let’s say COD is too big like Minecraft why not everything else? even if Microsoft made everything from AB exclusive it still wouldn’t put them near a monopoly… looks to me like they don’t really care about Xbox’s position in the console market and only care about GamePass growth but even then making the majority of AB games exclusive would be massive boost for GamePass because it would bring in a lot of new people to the Xbox ecosystem/consoles and I would bet that vast majority of their GamePass subscribers are on Xbox consoles so why don’t they want Xbox to have a bigger potential audience? I just don’t get it.
Anyway… I’m kind of just disappointed, Sony will still be Sony and do what they do while Xbox has to make concessions? even though they’re still not near Playstation in market share, doesn’t make any sense to me, I feel like Phil and Co owe Xbox console fans better and clearer messaging, are they serious about Xbox’s position in the market or not?
The Discovery-Warner media deal got the FTC greenlight. That was real fast.
Interesting
when was it filed tho we been hearing about this deal since last year